Against the grain

Ah, I remember that essay well, having read it in Dissent back in the day. I especially remember the sentence, “In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, The New Criterion is — on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it — right.” This was just two years after the Atlantic Monthly had declared that Dan Quayle was right, and by that point I began taking bets on which left-liberal publication would step up next and admit that Patrick Buchanan was — on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it — also right.

More seriously, the mistake in judgment involved here is the mistake of believing that the New Criterion was (or is) really engaged in a crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture. You would think that someone capable of seeing through Kramer and Kimball’s claims to disinterestedness wouldn’t make that kind of mistake, right at the very outset of the essay and all.

Thanks, Henry. I think your characterization of the essay (and of Scialabba’s modus operandi in general) is quite right, and of course I agree that conservative cultural tastes don’t map very neatly onto conservative political tastes. That agreement, in turn, rests on a much larger agreement about culture’s autonomy from politics. (Or, more accurately, an agreement that culture should be autonomous from politics.) So sign me up for point (1). As for point (2), this is Ye Olde “two-lefts” debate, which kept us occupied all decade long, trying to determine whether the politics of recognition were distracting everyone from the politics of redistribution (and/or whether, as Scialabba charges, some — actually, he says “most” — forms of cultural politics are “misguided and counterproductive”). Chapter 5 of the even-closer-to-forthcoming-than-ever (almost at copyediting stage!) The Left At War rehearses that debate, so I’ve got way too much to say on this and should restrain myself. But I think the counterargument was made quite well by Ellen Willis in her review of What’s the Matter with Kansas? (pdf).

As for (3), I’d say instead that the New Criterion’s counterattack against the politicization of culture by culturalist lefties is itself disingenuous and incoherent because, a few outliers like Guy Davenport aside, the New Criterion’s ideas about culture were and are political through and through. And that Scialabba knows this very well, hence

(4) w/r/t polemics, he knew he was doing that “contrarian” and “against the grain” thing by opening his essay by declaring Kramer, Kimball and Co. to be “right.” Especially in the pages of Dissent, where one might be expected to file a more (how do you say) partisan review. Which is a fine rhetorical strategy unto itself, and conductive to much good argument (hence my reply that it is mistaken about the aims of the New Criterion). By invoking the Quayle-and-Buchanan context, I was just remarking on how depressing it was, at the time, to read about the essential rightness of the culture-war right in places where you’d expect people to know better — not, I want to make clear, suggesting that Scialabba was embracing either one of those two jihadists.

I fixed the name. Sorry about that.

Where has that essay been getting attention recently? Links?

I have no idea why that passage in my post is crossed out. Maybe it was my conscience trying to tell me I’m being too bitter.

‘Join the protest’ and not ‘speak’ was what I wrote, RB. But thanks for the link, because (1) it corrects my mistaken belief that Lerner would not have been allowed to march, which was probably a stupid belief anyway, because how could they have stopped him and why would they have wasted time trying?, and (2) because–assuming its facts are accurate–it provides a wonderful little anecdote illustrating precisely the sniff-testing I was talking about. It’s like the People’s Liberation Front of Judea vs. the Judean People’s Liberation Front, but with more players and a whole lot less funny.

‘Join the protest’ and not ‘speak’ was what I wrote, RB.

Fair enough: “speak” was my assumption because I couldn’t imagine some sort of Lerner blockade. But – also assuming the link shows the correct story – Tikkun is the splitter: the ANSWER folks didn’t want speakers who’d criticized its coalition members, which is fair enough at a unity-against-the-war march, isn’t it?

Michael @3: “the New Criterion’s ideas about culture were and are political through and through”

Perhaps. But the magazine’s criticism (especially the selection under review) wasn’t political through and through; viz. (from the essay in question):

“Much of it is simply very good critical writing: John Simon on Nabokov; Joseph Epstein on Cavafy; Guy Davenport on Gertrude Stein; Brooke Allen on Shaw; Brad Leithauser on Housman; John Gross on Beerbohm; Samuel Lipman on Walter Gieseking; James Tuttleton on Frederick Douglass. In one of the book’s more programmatic pieces, Hilton Kramer calls for a return to connoisseurship i.e., “the close, comparative study of art objects [and literary texts] with a view to determining their relative levels of aesthetic quality.” It is a cogent formulation, which the above-mentioned essays and others in Against the Grain well exemplify.”

Michael, what do you think of this formulation of Kramer’s? Are judgments about “relative levels of aesthetic quality” inescapably political, and if so, why?

RB, that’s my point. The spats get in the way of having wider influence, and I really do think that too many groups on the left (the academic brand in particular) live on the spats, the splitting of hairs, the guarding of ideological boundaries, at the expense of reaching out and doing politics. That certainly does not mean that there aren’t other significant external obstacles to an effective left politics, or that people didn’t and don’t try to get around them. But maybe, if the left hadn’t spent so much time and energy fighting with itself over this petty crap–if we could all have held our agendas and actions to something like the test of pragmatic effectiveness that Henry extracted from Scialabba’s arguments–we might have come up with better ways to talk to the people who don’t read Tikkun or The Nation or In These Times or Mother Jones.

There was a window of opportunity after the attacks when many people’s beliefs were shaken up, when a critical mass of informed and thoughtful folks who really know how to communicate could have tried to frame a constructive discussion of what to do now (and an effective critique of the really stupid ‘what to do now’s the Bush Administration came up with). Knowing how the political establishment and the news media work in the US, it would have been a hard slog. But spend all your effort arguing over who gets to sit on the podium, and by the time you get to the mike, all you’ve got for the people who need your message are slogans and gestures. If we’re going to fail, at least we could try to fail nobly.

Oh, and Maurice, about the ANSWER/ Lerner spat, I hear you, but I wish you wouldn’t do the pox-on-both-your-spatty-houses thing. Some of us who criticized ANSWER on that score did so not because we cared about the arrangement of chairs on the podium (or who sat in them) but because we sincerely believed that having an antiwar movement led by a neo-Stalinist fringe sect was a Bad Idea, as Bad Ideas are measured by that there “pragmatic effectiveness” standard. Some people, like me, thought it was all well and good for neo-Stalinist fringe sects to be part of the antiwar camp, since every mass movement has its assorted wingnuts, and we’re certainly entitled to ours. But having ANSWER control the rallies meant, as RB notes, that no one who had criticized ANSWER would be allowed to speak, and remarkably, the other three groups that organized the SF rally agreed to this. RB, if you don’t see what’s wrong with that — and with the fact that Lerner was singled out by ANSWER (regardless of whether he himself asked to speak) even though his “criticism” of them didn’t even mention them by name — then we’ll just have to disagree about who the malefactor was.

But never mind Lerner. The point is that, as Maurice says, the left had “a window of opportunity after the attacks when many people’s beliefs were shaken up, when a critical mass of informed and thoughtful folks who really know how to communicate could have tried to frame a constructive discussion of what to do now.” And who stepped to the fore? A tiny sect who used antiwar rallies as windows of opportunities to harangue the Amerikkkan sheeple about Mumia, about the Cuban Five, and about how Palestine must be free from the river to the sea.

Michael, I was trying to say something about the narcissism of small differences on the left without drifting into the pox-on-both-houses stance, (a) because that’s lazy criticism and (b) because I live in both houses, from time to time at least, and I don’t want me no pox.

As far as criticizing ANSWER goes, I’m with you; having Stalinists in charge is a bad idea and worth criticizing, and perhaps ANSWER contributed more than others to the (further) marginalization of the left after September 11th. (Not that I’m a big fan of Lerner’s, either; he’s no neo-Stalinist, but that’s not a very high bar.) Yet perhaps you’d agree that having your attention drawn down by intramural arguments can be like greatness: some people are born distracted, some people learn to distract themselves, and some people have distractions thrust upon them.

A tiny sect who used antiwar rallies as windows of opportunities to harangue the Amerikkkan sheeple about Mumia, about the Cuban Five, and about how Palestine must be free from the river to the sea.

You must have met some of my students. (Not all of them, thankfully.)

To Michael Brube:
As usual, you are being very funny but in this case somewhat unresponsive. Let’s just stipulate that K&K are ideologues. With this stipulation, however, their critique of the of the largely left politicization of culture can still be accurate. To put a fine point on it, you say the NC’s critique of the politicization of culture by the left is disingenuous and incoheren, but in fact only demonstrate the first, not the second. And you rather to think that the NC’s rhetorical excess and association with ideologues is itself a demonstration of such incoherence. It’s not.

Hello, Michael

Pretty dreadful stuff you quote from Kimball. If most of the magazine and/or anthology were like that, they would be worth nothing more than an occasional citation on your Fun Fridays. But the essays I mentioned and hundreds of others in The New Criterion strike me as very good criticism. They may be — usually are — political at the margins, but not “through and through.”

What about that formulation of Kramer’s, that the essential purpose of criticism is to make judgments about “relative levels of aesthetic quality”? I ask again not to press a debating point but because it’s a fundamental issue , about which I’m still of somewhat divided mind.

where in this debate do you think Walzer was actually dishonest?

Walzer: America, in the eyes of Islamic zealots, is the Great Satan, and it is satanic because it is, however imperfectly, secular, democratic, and liberal–and also, of course, because it is powerful: Denmark is not the Great Satan.

This in express rejection of Scialabba’s point that terror vs. the U.S. was motivated in part by anger at U.S. foreign policy. Walzer completely rejects that point. We are “satanic” not because of anything we’ve done in the Middle East, but because we are secular, democratic, liberal, and powerful — period. We could have those qualities, never have had a CIA operative or a Marine set foot in the Middle East, never have sent a dollar to Israel, and the Islamic terrorists would still be attacking us.

That’s either dishonest or just plain stupid — hence, “Dishonest Prick, or What?” Henry thoughtfully left open the possibility of just plain stupidity.

What about that formulation of Kramer’s, that the essential purpose of criticism is to make judgments about “relative levels of aesthetic quality”? I ask again not to press a debating point but because it’s a fundamental issue , about which I’m still of somewhat divided mind.

No, I didn’t think you were pressing a debating point. It’s a great question, and I’ll try to do it justice in a way that befits the space of a comment thread. First off, I’m allergic to statements about “the essential purpose of criticism,” because when I first read F. R. Leavis saying that the essential gesture of criticism is to say this is so, is it not?, my response was to reply, no, criticism also says wait, it’s more complicated than that. That said, making judgments about relative levels of aesthetic quality is certainly one important function of criticism, which is what I was trying to get at in the ABF series — namely, that we do it all the time even w/r/t popular culture. But like everything else about criticism, it has a history. Yesterday I heard a lecture by Dave Hickey, in which Hickey argued that the aesthetic comparison of like to like (which he regarded as indispensable for criticism) had its origins in the early modern period, when, as in the Italian Renaissance, you had a bunch of painters all doing Annunciations and Crucifixions and Nativities and Flights Into Egypt, and the distinctions among artists had nothing to do with their subject matter (since they were all depicting the same things) and everything to do with the degree of their technical skill in handling materials (oil, marble, ceilings etc.). This seems right to me, and I have to say that it confirms the sense I got upon visiting the Sistine Chapel ten years ago, where I got the impression that commissions were doled out according to a very precise determination of artists by rank — such that the 17th best painter of Jesus’s baptism gets the fifth floor stairwell, and Rafael and Michelangelo, winners of their respective brackets, meet in the finals, where one gets the tapestries and the other gets the ceiling. And rightly so.

Then, too, there’s the famous bit from Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, where he notes that criticism used to be about telling artists how to go about the business of making things utile et dulce but now confines itself to making judgments about relative aesthetic quality: “The replacement of the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric (which speak to the multiplicities of intention and performance) by the discipline of criticism (which speaks of effect, and only through effect to intention and performance) is a central intellectual movement of the bourgeois period.” But now that we’ve historicized that function of criticism, I still think it’s something we simply can’t do without. As to whether it is the essential function of criticism, I remain agnostic.

Anderson: That looks to me like a genuine disagreement, not dishonesty. (Whether or not Walzer’s position is “just plain stupidity” is a question I’ll leave for others.)

Henry: I agree with you about the rudeness of the “informal alliance” bit, but the “three recommendations” bit seems to me a case of overeager reading between the lines, which is a debating error but which isn’t a moral failing like dishonesty.

Walzer overreaches here (as he did in his “Decent Left” essay of around the same time); I don’t dispute that. If I read the debate with an eye toward who won it, I have to agree with Maurice and others that it was Scialabba. But reading this sort of thing now, several years later, I’m less interested in scoring the debate points than in remembering how hard it was at the time to strike the right balance among several things that were important to do all at once. Walzer’s underlying worry seems to have been that people on the American left have a history of feeling alienated from our country and that this habit threatened to make us less capable of responding to the September 11 attacks in a way that was simultaneously principled and political and, well, decent. There seems to have been a kind of “let’s not be fools now” panic on the part of Walzer (and Paul Berman, and others) that led them into some unwise statements from time to time–here, for instance, since Scialabba’s argument was eminently decent. Sure, we should be able to recognize those unwise statements, but at least to me they seem less important now than the continuing relevance of that underlying worry, if we can extract it from the panic that surrounded it in the fall and winter of 2001.

That looks to me like a genuine disagreement, not dishonesty.

Hm. Perhaps it’s a matter of “relative levels of aesthetic quality,” then.

In one of the book’s more programmatic pieces, Hilton Kramer calls for a return to connoisseurship i.e., “the close, comparative study of art objects [and literary texts] with a view to determining their relative levels of aesthetic quality.” It is a cogent formulation, which the above-mentioned essays and others in Against the Grain well exemplify.”

But isn’t connoisseurship an inherently political way of looking at art? Especially the turn of the century Berenson stuff, it’s inextricably bound up with the idea of relative worth in not just an aesthetic sense, but also a monetary sense — that is to say, the idea that one can put a price, in principle, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Further, the people doing the judging tend to smuggle in a bunch of hidden assumptions (normally based on the greatness of a particular period of Italian art) and then cast them as impartial statements about intrinsic merit and such.

Keir: isn’t connoisseurship an inherently political way of looking at art?

I’m not sure. Suppose you found yourself asked to discuss whether Anna Karenina was a better novel than Princess Daisy. Couldn’t you compare their “relative levels of aesthetic quality” without considering politics at all, or scarcely at all?

@33: “Walzer’s underlying worry seems to have been that people on the American left have a history of feeling alienated from our country and that this habit threatened to make us less capable of responding to the September 11 attacks in a way that was simultaneously principled and political and, well, decent.”

Unfortunately, Walzer chose to express this worry in an essay whose title — “Can There Be a Decent Left?” — was both patronizing and self-righteous, and whose tone (as I dimly recall it) was for the most part similar. So on this particular point I agree w/ l. pitkin.

Isn’t there plenty of interest in discussing style, character, imagery, structure, symbol, irony, and other aesthetic matters?

But you have to understand genre to discuss formal considerations, and you have to place the works in context to read them correctly, no? (Duccio/Giotto has to also consider Siena/Florence and the role of the Madonna and so on.)

Also, I wouldn’t say there’s no interest, just not as much interest as in a broader discussion. Who’d win Mongols or Romans is interesting, just not what I expect military historians to spend a great deal of time on.

Isn’t there plenty of interest in discussing style, character, imagery, structure, symbol, irony, and other aesthetic matters?

As someone who dropped out of a Ph.D. English program, my answer is, “no, unfortunately not.” I went to grad school hoping to learn the technical skill of studying how literature works. A big, naive mistake.

My personal, prejudiced theory is that many people prefer politicizing literature because they would rather talk about politics than about literature. It also has the advantage of being easier. You don’t have to read the entire book (indeed, a professor can conduct a two-hour seminar without once opening the assigned text), and everyone already thinks himself knowledgeable about politics.

Agree or disagree with what Paul de Man thought English departments should be doing, I think it’s hard to disagree with his characterization of them as “large organizations in the service of everything except their own subject matter.”

Last I checked, China was still working on becoming a world power.

Considering that they hold about a trillion $ of U.S. bonds, I’m reminded of the riddle, “What do you have when you hold two little green balls in your hand?” Answer: “Kermit’s undivided attention.”

Hard to be the ‘Great Satan’ if your number 2-8.

Well, they can be the Great Asmodeus, or Great Beelzebub. Hell hath its hierarchies.

Suppose you found yourself asked to discuss whether Anna Karenina was a better novel than Princess Daisy. Couldn’t you compare their “relative levels of aesthetic quality” without considering politics at all, or scarcely at all?

A consistent disciple of Bourdieu might say that such hierarchic comparison make sense only in an autonomous field (or in a relative formulation, that the more the field is autonomous, the more theses comparisons make sense). The way I see it, literature is a not very autonomous field, so that if you want to compare two novels, and if you don’t want to give the impression your judgment ultimately rests upon matters of personal frivolous taste, you’ll have first to establish some kind of autonomous foundations establishing the value of your criteria, and in doing so you almost inescapably bump into political considerations (if only political considerations within academia).

This is why, for instance, the choice of the Nobel prize in literature is invariably criticized, whereas the Nobel prize in physics very rarely so, and the Fields medal has never been (to the best of my knowledge).

But if my (or rather Bourdieu’s) approach is correct, then there is hope, as it could be that the field of literature is getting more and more autonomous. I would say (but I wouldn’t really know, being too far from this field myself) that the efforts of homosexual, women, cultural, you-name-it studies have had on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it a positive influence towards more autonomy.

An intriguing comment, Z. But instead of considering a priori whether the status of literature with respect to autonomy allowed one to rank Anna Karenina and Princess Daisy, you might have noticed that there is no difficulty whatever in ranking the two novels, and then drawn some conclusions about the degree of literature’s autonomy.

There are lots of interesting arguments about relative merit in literary criticism that don’t seem, to me at least, to have much of anything to do with politics. How good a poet is Shelley? Is Daniel Deronda better without Daniel Deronda? Is Dostoevsky a genius, as most of us think, or a hack, as Nabokov thought? Are Henry James’s final novels a supreme achievement or a dreadful mistake?

“Personal frivolous taste” — you’re not suggesting some necessary correspondence between these two adjectives, are you?

all surely legitimate areas

Yes, certainly. But remember where this thread started out: with the question of whether criticism was necessarily political “through and through”; that is, whether judgments about “relative levels of aesthetic quality” were possible, never mind useful. All I’ve been arguing for is the possible relative autonomy of aesthetic criticism. And of course I’ve also been asserting, without arguing, that that kind of criticism can be pretty interesting too.

Anderson at 49.

Yes China is an economic power. So is Japan and the Netherlands. With out a deep sea navy and significantly more troop transports, China is only a regional military power. Don’t worry they are actively working on both limitations.